


How Mac Got Jacked

by hadesfirst



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: (he's in nd but. he's still a bastard), Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Everything, Dennis is a Bastard Man, Episode: s13e10 Mac Finds His Pride, Gen, Internalized Homophobia, Religious Guilt, frank appears briefly and once but that's it, in between s12 and s13, like real brief appearance from frank though, macden if you really want to squint for it but not really, post-ddl, the gang mostly isn't present, warning for 2 f slurs in reference to hohc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-11-02 09:07:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20693924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hadesfirst/pseuds/hadesfirst
Summary: The dark-haired guy in the sleeveless shirt steps in front of her and waves for her attention anyway, god damn it. She puts on her most serene smile, pauses her music, and turns her head to look up at him.“Hi, it looks like there’s been some kind of mix-up,” he says. “You see, I’m always here on Thursday afternoons, and I always start working out with this thing. It’s kind of a routine I have. If I don’t use my machine at the right time, I could get some serious muscle loss.”Laura heaves out a heavy sigh, half from stopping her reps when she was in the middle of going full force, but half from relief. It’s certainly not “his” machine (and “getting muscle loss”? What the actual shit, dude), but it could have also been a lot worse.Laura finds a new workout buddy. Mac finds catharsis. A prequel to Mac Finds His Pride, set in between seasons 12 and 13.





	How Mac Got Jacked

**Author's Note:**

> If you're here uh holy shit thank you

The first time that Laura meets the weird guy at the gym, it’s actually a pretty mundane situation, as far as things go. She’s finishing up her last few reps at the seated overhead press machine when a guy with dark, slicked-back hair and a stubbly face approaches her. At first, she eyes him warily and prays he’s not going to talk to her—Laura’s met her fair share of creepy gym bros, offering everything from unwanted sexual advances to unsolicited workout advice, and while she has her methods and planned comebacks for shutting them down, she would rather not have to deal with it at all, and especially not when it’s only a little over a month until her next show, and the way that her dance company has kicked into feverish high gear is all the stress that she needs in her life right now, thank you very much, man in the sleeveless shirt. Does he think that it shows off his arms? It doesn’t make them look muscular, if that’s what he’s trying to do. She imagines a giant hand smacking him out of the way and hopes that her aura or whatever conveys the message without her having to acknowledge him.

The dark-haired guy in the sleeveless shirt steps in front of her and waves for her attention anyway, god  _ damn  _ it. She puts on her most serene smile, pauses her music, and turns her head to look up at him.

“Hi, it looks like there’s been some kind of mix-up,” he says. “You see, I’m always here on Thursday afternoons, and I always start working out with this thing. It’s kind of a routine I have. If I don’t use my machine at the right time, I could get some serious muscle loss.”

Laura heaves out a heavy sigh, half from stopping her reps when she was in the middle of going full force, but half from relief. It’s certainly not “his” machine (and “getting muscle loss”? What the actual shit, dude), but it could have also been a lot worse.

“Oh, yeah, I was just finishing up on here,” she laughs, because she was, and she needs to get in some leg work today, anyway. She does one last press, slides off of the seat, and grabs her water bottle and phone off of the floor. “All yours, man.”

“Sweet!” The guy perks up almost immediately, bursting into a wide, almost childlike smile as he plops down on the machine. He doesn’t even bother to look back up at her, much less say thank you, but Laura has bigger problems than some rando at the gym not saying thank you, so she simply stretches out her arms and walks away.

As Laura heads towards the other side of the gym, a loud clanking racket sounds from behind her, pretty obviously the guy trying and failing to adjust the weights (it sounds like he fails a few times in a row, given the loud “Son of a bitch!” that quickly sounds from his area, followed by a healthy number of slightly quieter shits and fucks). And, despite her best efforts, a weight of obligation sinks down through her chest and slows her walking pace to a halt. This guy probably needs actual help, and the least she can do is offer some. 

She cranes her neck over her shoulder to check on the guy, but by the time she gets a good look at him, he’s pumping the bar above his head as fast as he possibly can, no regards to form, brow furrowed in concentration. He’s also letting out a loud “HUH!” with every press, like a cheesy sound effect in some bad martial arts flick, practically spitting venom with every cry (he’s not, but he is spitting regular saliva. Gross). Some of the other people working out near him are starting to glare in his direction, but he’s apparently too focused on his workout to notice that they exist.

It’s far from the weirdest thing that Laura’s ever seen at the gym, but there’s still no denying that the guy looks like a total idiot. Laura turns back around, rolls her eyes, and grins. Hey, with her show coming up and a solo that she’s almost-but-not-quite finished choreographing, she deserves a laugh every once in a while before she goes crazy (no offense, weird karate noise guy). And as Laura heads over to the water fountain to refill her bottle, she figures that other than getting that occasional laugh, she’s never going to talk to or think about that guy again.

* * *

That is, until Laura decides to pop into the sauna post-workout the following Thursday and walks in on the same guy alone in there, just kind of… sobbing on the bench with his head in his hands. Even though the door shuts loudly behind her, he’s still sobbing for about thirty seconds before he lifts up his head to wipe at his eyes, and only then does he notice that Laura is standing there in front of him, frozen to the hot, hot floor. 

They’re both stuck in ridiculously tense silence for about ten more seconds, just staring at each other wide-eyed, before Laura finally reasons with herself that it’s going to be more awkward if she  _ doesn’t  _ say anything, whether she leaves or sits down. He looks so  _ scared _ , and she’s got to break the ice somehow, right?

“Are you okay?” she asks him. She winces a little, even as she says it, because it’s incredibly clear that he’s  _ not _ okay, and even though Laura had attempted to inject her voice with a kind of caring-mother-warm-milk-and-cookies tone, the muscles in the guy’s jaw twitch and clench up. So, an utter failure, but really, what else was she supposed to even say in this situation? Clearly, she needs to try a new tactic. 

But before she can think of anything better to soften the blow that she’s clearly just dealt out in her attempt to help, the guy’s face screws up, flushing redder than it already had been from the heat. “Get out of here, you stupid bitch!” he shouts, and he almost looks like he’s about to stand up and punch her square in the face. 

“Okay, okay!” Laura rushes as she pushes her way back out of the door and slams it behind her. She slumps back against the door for a second, gulping in breath after breath in a weak attempt to catch it, and after a little bit, when her breathing is a little more steady again, she can hear the muffled sobs starting up from behind the door again.

“Holy shit,” she whispers to herself, letting out a rush of air. Granted, she doesn’t know how she’d actually react in the moment if a stranger had walked in on her crying in the sauna alone, and it also probably wouldn’t have been pleasant for either of them, but  _ man _ , was this dude intense.

She’s still leaning against the door god knows how many minutes later, the time having mostly been occupied by deep breaths to get her heart rate back to its resting level and quick shakes of the head towards approaching gym-goers in order to keep them from suffering the same fate that she had. It’s only then that she notices that the sound of the guy in the sauna is a lot quieter now, the sobs more spaced out and less intense. Glancing back, she peels her hands off of the door’s surface, wiping the sweat from her palms onto her thighs, and gathers her stuff. She almost wants to wait and see if he’s okay, but given that he had called her a stupid bitch, he probably wouldn’t be too happy to see her, and, on second thought, she doesn’t feel like trying to have a calm and collected conversation with someone who had just called her a stupid bitch. So she walks all the way to the locker room without looking back once. 

* * *

It’s less than a week later this time (Sunday afternoon) before, once again, the same guy is waving his hand in her face in the middle of her workout, this time while she’s at the rowing machine. He has to crouch down in order to get right in front of her, somehow still feeling the need to wave his hand at her as if she’s stupid, as if he hadn’t already made his presence known. 

Laura pauses her music, takes out her headphones, and frowns up at him. “I thought you said you came on Thursdays.”

“Yeah, hi, listen,”—he breezes past her comment—“so, the dude you saw last week was not me. It was a totally different guy who was, like, way less badass. Maybe you can tell, because my muscles—”

“Dude, it’s fine,” Laura cuts him off. “It’s not like I’ve never cried in the gym before. I’m not going to, like, go around gossiping about you or anything.”

“No, no, you see, it was a totally different dude,” the guy protests. “That dude, he probably had really small arms and barely any pecs.” He’s starting to flick his hands out in front of him, gesturing back and forth with fervor. “N-not that I, that I saw this ja—guy, this guy, but if he was crying, then it wasn’t—wasn’t me—”

“Look, dude, it’s  _ fine _ ,” Laura laughs, “your secret’s safe with me, if you really need it to be one.” She puts one earbud back in her ear. “Okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” and the guy’s hand gestures start to slow down. “Yeah, yeah, cool.” He nods and turns away, and Laura takes that as her cue to slip her other earbud back into her ear and start up her workout playlist again. She closes her eyes and begins to row, slipping once more into the steady back-and-forth rhythm. The beat of her song in thrumming in her ears, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-thr—

Something feels off. She cracks an eye open, and, sure enough, the sleeveless shirt bro (yeah, he’s wearing another sleeveless shirt. This one certainly did not come sleeveless, by the way; it’s literally just a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Laura is not a fan) is still standing next to her. His eyes are fixed on the rowing machine that sits on her left side, but he’s not using it or anything. He’s just…staring down at it. 

This fucking guy. She would be annoyed if it weren’t for the sinking feeling of obligation that’s worked its way back into her chest. No, hang on, that’s not right. It’s not quite obligation; it's leaning further towards...compassion? The guy does seem to have had a pretty rough week. With a deep sigh, she pauses her music again and stretches out her foot to tap him on the ankle. 

He starts and whips around, banging his ankle on the rowing machine and almost completely eating shit on the gym floor, before a few stumbles find him back steady on his feet. He scrunches up his face and hacks out a few coughs before he blinks and gapes down at her. “What?”

Laura smiles and cocks her head over at the machine the guy just tripped over. “Need some help?”

Sleeveless Shirt Guy scoffs down at her. “Uh, no, I’ve been going to the gym since basically when I was, what, born? I know how to use everything.” He crouches down and plops himself onto the machine’s seat, positioning himself upright. “You know, uh, like, you…” He grabs the handle and jerks it towards his body, but his feet aren’t strapped onto the footrests, and they slip past the footrests to slam flat on the ground. The momentum hurls his body forward and the machine makes a sharp and immediate contact with his groin.

“Shit!” he shouts, and, contracting into the fetal position, he rolls off the side of the machine, cradling his injured balls, evidently. “Shit. Shit, Jesus Christ.”

This is the most genuine smile that Laura has had on her face in over a month. Should she be more concerned than she currently is that the most genuine smile that she’s had on her face in over a month is at someone else’s expense, much less that it’s over something as juvenile as a stranger hitting himself in the balls? 

“I’m okay,” the guy pipes up suddenly through clenched teeth and a severely squeezed-in throat, and Laura just about snorts out loud at the absurdity of the whole thing. Aw, what the hell. She’ll worry about her conscience and her sense of maturity at a later date.

“Okay, man,” Laura says. “You do you.” She pauses as the guy gets back to his feet with his hand still over his crotch. “I’ll just be over here, checking if my  _ foot straps  _ are  _ tight enough _ .” She arcs her arm dramatically over her head (gee, all of that port de bras practice sure is paying off in spades) and dips her hand down to her foot to yank at the straps with the subtlety of a neon sign that read “THIS IS HOW NOT TO LOSE A TESTICLE!” and hopes that it’s enough of an indication for him.

He does thankfully appears to get the message, because the moment that Mr. Hard Rock Cafe (look, the dude’s done so many odd things at this point that one nickname or epithet just won’t encapsulate him one bit. The shirt, at least, is only the tip of the iceberg) regains a little bit of composure and takes a seat back onto the rowing machine and sets his feet in place, he immediately tightens the foot straps. Laura peeks at him out of the corner of her eye as he grabs the handle again, but the handle is quivering in his grip and he’s not even trying to pull on it. 

“You start by pushing outwards with your legs and  _ then _ pulling the handle in,” Laura mumbles in his direction. It’s not even a snarky you-should-know-better voice, which what usually comes out of her mouth when some dumbass at the gym doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing, so her genuine tone is a healthy surprise. She extends her legs slowly for demonstration purposes, pushing away from the footrests, and then pulls the handle in towards her torso.

“Yeah, I know,” the guy says, but Laura can see that he’s mimicking her motions carefully, pushing out with his legs before pulling his arms in. When Laura lets her arms out slack again and re-bends her knees, the guy does the same. When Laura begins to speed up the motion, the guy follows her example. His face finally starts to relax and his eyes soften. It’s enough to make Laura soften a little, too.

“There you go, you got it,” Laura laughs. 

“Awesome,” the guy mutters to himself, but not like he’s thanking her. It’s just more like he’s marveling at his own newfound ability to use a rowing machine. “Yeah!” He stops and looks up, and his face just has this giant dopey grin on it.

“You’re welcome,” Laura teases him and rolls her eyes, slowing down on the rowing machine until she eventually comes to a stop. “I’m Laura, by the way. And you are…?”

Sleeveless Shirt Guy doesn’t answer, instead cocking an eyebrow and scanning her up and down like he’s looking for a weapon. “I think I see what’s going on here.”

Well, Laura doesn’t know what the fuck is going on here. “What?”

“Look, I get it,” he says, turning sideways on the seat of the rowing machine to face her and holding up a hand. “You’re offering to help out someone like  _ me _ , an already incredibly strong and capable guy at the gym, because you’re incredibly attracted to my suave way of talking and my muscular body and stuff, and I get it. But I gotta tell you right now that I’m gay, ‘cause I don’t want to lead you on.”

Laura blinks once, then twice. “Yeah, literally not at all what I was going for, man,” she says. “I’m helping you learn how to use a rowing machine because you clearly don’t know how to use a rowing machine.  _ And  _ because on Thursday you were crying in the sauna—”

“Okay, not crying,”—he points a finger—“that was—eye sweat—”

“Whatever, dude, I’m just trying to help. Look, what’s your name?”

The guy lets his hand fall. “Mac.”

Laura smiles. “Mac,” she repeats. “Well, nice to meet you, Mac. And nice to start a completely platonic conversation.”

Mac squints again. “Is that reverse psychology or something? Because I’m still gay.”

“So am I, okay? You’re not special,” Laura retorts. 

“Wait.” Mac shakes his head, blinking in disbelief. “You’re a lesbian? But.. you don’t look like a lesbian. You… your hair…” He waves his hand frantically up and down over his front as if to indicate that she isn’t aware of how long her hair is. He seems to be far too fixated on that one thing.

Laura rolls her eyes. “I mean, I’m  _ bi _ , but still,” she says. “You can look however and still be whatever you are, okay? It’s not like you’re a walking stereotype yourself.”

“Like how I’m not a twink,” Mac points out. 

“Right. Never said you were, bud.” Laura responds, raising an eyebrow in his direction. “Listen, though, for real, if you ever need help with anything else, let me know.”

Mac laughs, glancing down at the gym floor. “Yeah, I mean, I’m trying to get more muscular, not thinner like girls do at the gym, but thanks.”

Laura smirks at him and rakes some of the sweat out of her hair. “Dude, I could probably bench press you,” she retorts (she probably couldn’t,  _ maybe  _ she could  _ try  _ to do it, but come on, she’s got a point to prove).

“Look, whatever you can do,” Mac replies, flattening out his hands, “I am the master of cultivating and harvesting mass, okay? I gained sixty pounds and I lost the same sixty pounds right after and that was all within, like, three months, so, your move.”

Laura almost falls off of her rowing machine seat, and she makes a point of snorting indignantly at him once she regains her balance. “Three months?  _ Sixty pounds _ ?”

Mac raises his head high and grins. “And I’m gonna do it again soon.”

“Okay, uh, well, you should not do that,” Laura mutters. “Mac, no offense, but how are you not dead?”

He smiles sagely. “Oh, you know,” Mac offers. “God.” And then his face quirks up, and he stops talking, and he looks down at the floor again, and he doesn’t look back up for a very long time.

“Uh, okay,” Laura says, eyeing Mac’s face for signs of the guy from the sauna, in case she ends up needing to comfort him,because she’ll have to get way more comforting, and fast. “I mean, I have, like, good workout routines for getting stronger, ‘cause I do a lot of lifts, and I can show them to you if you want.”

“Um, I lift all the time.”

“Not lifting weights,” Laura responds, “you know, lifting people. In dance routines. So that helps build a lot of muscle.”

Mac raises an eyebrow. “Muscles? From dancing?”

Laura rises from the rowing machine. “Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it,” she quips, taking a quick swig from her water bottle. “I mean, I have to say, I’ve always worked out a lot, but I never really got in shape until I picked up a sport. That’s my biggest recommendation if you want to gain muscle without…you know…dying.”

“Yeah, okay,” Mac says, shrugging his shoulders, “but if I’m going to do a sport, I’m going to do a real sport. Like karate.”

“Oh, a  _ real _ sport, like  _ karate _ ?” Laura snickers, looks down at him. “So, do you do any martial arts now?” (She doubts it.)

“Yeah, of course,” Mac affirms, “and I think I’m gifted or something, because I’m, you know, totally self-taught, and I’m already pretty damn good at it, so…”

Laura can’t keep the smirk from her face. “ _ Really _ .”

Mac immediately leaps up into a fighting stance. “Really.” And that’s when Laura has to dodge out of his way because Mac starts slashing through the air with his hands in blades, generating sound effects with his mouth as he goes. 

“All right, I got it!” Laura laughs, ducking away from his attacks, but Mac is already in his own world, fighting off a squadron of invisible ninjas or dragons or whatever. It’s when he starts kicking that Laura comes back to her senses and realizes that maybe they should chill, since the two of them are in a very crowded gym in an area that’s tightly packed with gym equipment and maybe they should quit messing around before they get kicked out.

“Okay, I get it, that’s probably good,” Laura says. 

Mac does about three more karate chops before he comes back to the moment, puts his hands on his hips, and pants, “Just an example. Of my talent.”

Laura gives him a tight-lipped smile. “I see. You’re definitely enthusiastic. I think you should try to find a class.”

Mac bursts into another smile. “ _ Thank  _ you! Like, almost all my friends say it’s lame and that I need to”—he throws up his fingers in air quotes—“‘calm down, we actually want people to come to our bar’, but they don’t get that I’m keeping out the danger! My friend Charlie gets it, though, he’s great.”

“Wait, your friends have a bar?” Laura asks. “Which one? Would I know it?”

“ _ Me  _ and my friends have a bar, yeah,” Mac says with a grin as he sets back his shoulders. “I’m our head of security, so if you’ve been there, you’ve probably seen me around, keeping everyone safe, you know. But yeah, we run Paddy’s Pub.”

“Wait. Paddy’s Pub?” Laura lets out a chuckle. “That makes—I mean, you are gay.”

“What, did you expect it to be The Rainbow or something just because I’m  _ gay? _ ” He exhales heavily, crossing his arms in front of him. “That’s a stereotype. I mean, anybody can run a bar—”

“No, I mean, it makes sense for you,” Laura interrupts him. “I mean, you don’t seem like—I mean, cause The Rainbow is, like, the party bar, you know, and it makes sense that your bar would be the chill one.”

Mac furrows his brow. “The chill...bar?”

Laura sweeps her hand out slowly to guide him along her train of thought. “You know. The chill... _ gay _ bar. Although I don’t know if chill is even the right word for it, ‘cause my friend took her girlfriend there for Valentines Day, and she said there was a whole thing with anthrax? So not exactly a cool summer breeze or whatever.” 

Something clicks for Mac, and he suddenly nods, wagging his index finger. “Oh, yeah, I can explain that. So we thought it was anthrax, but it was just  _ fake  _ anthrax that Dennis put in there because he was mad and lonely and stuff, but I gave him the perfect Valentines gift and it was all good.”

Laura doesn’t know who this “Dennis” is, but she does know that even if Mac seems all right, she does not want to ever meet the guy if she doesn’t have to. Like, she won’t bother Mac about if that’s what works for him, but it certainly doesn’t sound like a fairy-tale relationship.

“Look,” says Mac, snapping Laura out of her trance, “the point is that Paddy’s isn’t a gay bar. If it were, I’m gay, so I’d be the first person to know.”

“I don’t know, man, I haven’t even been there.” Laura reaches for her phone to check the time. “All I know is that I know three girls who’ve successfully picked up girls there, and one bi dude I know who’s there all the time. Maybe it just has a reputation.”

Mac shrugs his shoulders. “We were only a gay bar  _ once, _ but okay.”

Wait.  _ Once? _ Laura really wants to stay to find out exactly what he means, but if she’s late again to dinner with her mom, her mother swears she’ll be out of the will (probably a joke, but still). 

“Look, I have to go,” she says, “but I’ll tell you what. I’ll see you here this time next week and I’m gonna ask you if you signed up for a martial arts class, okay?”

Mac smiles. “Yeah, sure,” he finally answers, “but I’m going to ask you if you went to Paddy’s, ‘cause it’s a pretty sweet bar.” 

“Can you promise that there’ll be no anthrax scares this time?”

“Uh, probably.” Mac extends his hand.

Laura grabs it and shakes it firmly. “You’ve got a deal, Mac.”

* * *

Laura stops by Paddy’s Pub on Monday morning. When she had searched up the address earlier to put it into Maps, their Yelp page had only had one-star and five-star reviews. And somehow, despite the impressive array of famous athletes that have their names attached to almost all of those five-star reviews (all of which have suspiciously similar syntax and grammar, with “more better” appearing in quite a few of them), the vibe she gets of the place is leaning a lot more towards the one-star ones.

Luckily, when she arrives, it seems that she doesn’t have anything to worry about. Not because the hole-in-the-wall dive doesn’t give off an extremely sketchy vibe, because it does, it really does (there’s even an exploded shell of a car sitting right in front of the building). However, the entire front entrance is blocked off with caution tape (albeit haphazardly; it looks like somebody just crumpled it up and stuck as much of it on the door as they possibly could. Not a professional job) and Laura is almost immediately bowled over by a short fat old man who comes barrelling out of the alleyway with a red canister of gasoline in hand and a long strip of yellow caution tape stuck to his shoe. 

“Um, excuse me,” she calls out, and the short man whips around, sloshing some of the gasoline out of the container.

“What?” he shouts.

“Is this…” Laura gestures to the sign above the taped-up door. “So this is Paddy’s Pub?”

“We’re closed,” the man blurts, and takes off in the other direction. Unfortunately, he almost immediately gets his foot tangled in the caution tape stuck to his shoe, and he smashes to the ground,  _ hard _ , dumping the entire thing of gasoline all over himself. There’s a few groans from his crumpled form on the ground, and then Laura hears a muffled “Aw, shit, that’s not good.”

The reason that Laura doesn’t have anything to worry about is because she gets right back in her car and leaves without having to set foot inside the bar. It’s a win-win situation.

* * *

“You didn’t even go in?” Mac scoffs indignantly on Thursday while he’s spotting Laura’s deadlift. “What was the point, then?”

“I told you, there was caution tape all over the door,” Laura strains, tightening her grip on the barbell. “Was I just supposed to go in? The old guy said it was closed.”

“Okay, so clearly you don’t get the plan, so I’m going to have to explain it to you.” Suddenly, Mac is out from behind Laura and back in her field of vision. “So, what’s, like, the thing that people are looking for the most when they’re trying to find a cool new place to go?” He gestures out at Laura expectantly.

“Uh, fun?” Laura tries. Knees. Focus on standing up and locking the knees. “Good atmosphere or something?” A second to breathe. She sets the barbell back down the floor with a loud clank and stretches her arms across her body one by one. Turns out that answering unrelated questions while doing it makes deadlifting a whole lot harder. “Cool people?”

“Bragging rights,” Mac answers, his eyes lighting up with some kind of devilish glee. “See, people want to be able to say, you know, that they’ve been to this cool underground place, so they feel special.” He sticks out one hand, palm up. “And people also really like a little danger, right? That’s why they go bungee jumping and climb mountains and shit.” He sticks out the other hand, mirroring the first. “So the perfect way to get more business for the bar?” He smashes his hands together. “Do  _ both  _ of them. And it’s like how people explore abandoned buildings, you know? Except they’re buying drinks and meeting abandoned-building-exploring chicks or dudes or whatever.”

Laura snorts. “Well, call me crazy, but I don’t think telling people that the bar is closed is a good way to get  _ more  _ business,” she says, squatting down to the barbell once more and grabbing hold of it.

“But that was the point!” He shakes his head. “If you let just anybody in, it’s not gonna be a cool dangerous underground club anymore, it’s just gonna be a regular bar. And why would you  _ want  _ a regular bar when you could have a cool exclusive badass underground club?” Finally, his eyes focus back on Laura. “Try not to arch your back, bro.”

Laura straightens out her lower back and clenches her abdomen to keep it straight as she lifts. “Well, did it work?”

“Not this time,” Mac admits. “It became a crack house in, like, five days. But that doesn’t make it a bad idea, okay? It was a good idea, and it would’ve worked out eventually if Dee hadn’t threatened to burn me with her lighter and then hit gasoline instead of me. They lost a lot of crack.”

“O-kay,” Laura grunts, straightening up into the deadlift. This is the part where she would usually ask more questions if it weren’t for the fact that she was holding a one hundred and sixty-pound weight in her hands and she can’t dedicate too much focus into the logistics of the crack house incident, lest she fall backwards, pass out, and crush her legs under the barbell. So she takes Mac’s story for what it is and nods her head. 

“Yeah, not our most successful scheme, but that’s okay, ‘cause I am bursting with ideas, okay, and as long as no one else fucks them up, I’m gonna have the idea for the most successful scam and it’ll make us so much money that they’ll have to admit that I’m smart and they lesstimated me.”

Laura frowns, painfully aware of the bar digging into her palms. “Underestimated, you mean?”

“No,  _ lesstimated, _ ” Mac repeats. “I came up with it, and I’m trying to get it to the point of being, like, a thing. Think about it. It’s shorter, cleaner, more cleverer, and it’s also  _ way _ easier to remember. Oh, you  _ estimated _ that something would be  _ less _ ? So you  _ lesstimated  _ it.  _ Think _ about it,” he says again, beckoning her to agree. “You’ll see when it’s in the dictionary.” 

Laura doubts that it will be, but she manages to hold her tongue on that front and instead decides to strike back at him in a different way.

“What about your martial arts classes?” she asks, settling the barbell to the ground. “Did you end up finding one?”

“Here’s the thing,” Mac prefaces. “No.  _ But,  _ but, but,” he shouts before Laura has any time to respond, “I think the solo training I’ve been doing has caused a lot of progress in me, so I might not even  _ need  _ it.”

Laura shifts a few of the weights off of each side of the barbell and backs up to let Mac do some deadlifts of his own. “Look, Mac, I’m not making you sign up for anything. It was just a recommendation.”

“Are you saying I can’t do it?” Mac challenges as he steps over to the barbell in front of Laura. “‘Cause I can.  _ Cat-like  _ reflexes, man, okay? And I’m, I’m strong, and, and—” His back is to Laura now, but she can see his body starting to shake, the back of his neck turning red. “I’m, I’m—see—” He grasps down for the barbell.

“Dude!” Laura starts forward and claps a hand on Mac’s shoulder. Mac tenses under her touch but doesn’t move away. Laura sighs. “You have to breathe if you want to lift, okay?”

Mac huffs, straightens his back, and takes a few sharp breaths. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. You can’t do a proper deadlift if your breath isn’t exactly in control, man. Take a second,” Laura says, and slowly but surely, Mac’s breaths begin to slow, his shaking back reaching a standstill.

Holy shit. That  _ worked?  _ Laura’s as surprised as anyone.

Mac kind of just stands there for a little bit, and Laura keeps her hand on his shoulder until he bends down again to deadlift the barbell, and she backs up so she can properly spot him. He lifts up the barbell, holds it there for a bit, and sets it back down. Laura would usually be encouraging him at this point to add some more weight, get a few more lifts in, but she doesn’t want to do the thing she did before where she tried to be comforting and encouraging but just got called a stupid bitch instead for screwing up that badly.

Mac ends up doing it anyway—that is, adding a little more weight, doing a couple more lifts. Laura just stands by and makes sure he doesn’t die, and before she knows it, they’re journeying to another part of the gym. 

“All right, next one!” Mac shouts gleefully as if nothing had happened, and for all Laura can tell, it’s completely genuine joy. So Laura decides to go along with it because it’s better than not talking.

“Yeah, sure!” Laura chirps, but it’s forced. She had attempted to match Mac’s boundless enthusiasm, but evidently, Mac bounces back like rubber, whereas when it comes to her state of mind, she’s a little more like glue, with emotions glomming onto her and festering until they finally get to rot away. God, she’s almost starting to get a little envious. Of  _ Sleeveless Shirt Guy _ , who accidentally turned his bar into a crack house. But hey, he actually looks happy.

They’re finishing up at the end of the day, towelling the sweat off their necks and filling up on water, when Mac suddenly turns to her. “Hey, Laura?”

Laura looks up from her phone. “Yeah?”

“So you’re here on Thursdays, too. Do you also come every Sunday, then?”

“Yeah,” Laura answers. “I usually stop in around two o’clock?”

Mac throws his towel over his shoulder and starts counting something on his fingers. After a few seconds, he whips his head back up and says, “Yeah, that’ll work. I have church in the morning, but I think I can get here by two if service doesn’t run long.”

“Great.” Laura smiles and starts to head for the locker room. “See you then, I assume?”

Mac doesn’t actually answer back, but the smile on his face gives Laura a resounding “yes.''

* * *

The two of them quickly become twice-a-week workout buddies after that, sometimes even three times if their schedules allow for it. Laura hasn’t really had a steady workout partner for a while now, and it’s refreshing, to say the least. It’s not that she doesn’t adore the rest of her dance company, but the month before the show is always high-stress, especially now that the youth company is starting to get ready in their space, too, and everyone’s frazzled, and Mac’s just...it’s not that he’s not really fucking extra all the time, because he is. But the thing about her troupe is that when they get intense, they laser-focus their passion and rage into perfect, precise dance. And Laura is usually just as dedicated to perfect, precise dance as any of the rest of them, but every line of work requires a break or a distraction from time to time. Mac may be just as intense as the people that she dances with, but he’s happy to flit from thing to thing (at the gym, from machine to machine, exercise to exercise), and the variety is nice. Plus, he gets happy like a little puppy dog and it’s adorable.

They meet consistently, week after week, and for the most part, Laura’s impression of Mac is happy-go-lucky. And yeah, sure, he gets pretty competitive, betting Laura he can do more push-ups than her, but Laura is just as competitive, especially with gym bros who think they’re hot shit, so it works out just fine. The point is that Laura doesn’t get any real glimpses of the sobbing guy who called her a bitch in the sauna. In fact, she barely remembers the sobbing guy who called her a bitch in the sauna. 

That is, until one week when Mac doesn’t show up on Thursday afternoon.

Laura is fine with it at first, since Mac isn’t exactly one for punctuality anyway, and it seems like he’s probably just late again. So she starts working out alone. But ten minutes pass, and then twenty minutes pass, and the gym, her workout, it all feels kind of empty without her new gym partner, because, as embarrassing as it is, she’d kind of gotten used to his weird shouted words of encouragement. And when Laura eventually checks the clock as she’s approaching a treadmill, it dawns on her that almost half the time that she and Mac usually spend working out together has already slipped through her fingers, and he’s  _ still _ nowhere to be seen.

It’s not like he texted her or anything, and it’s probably nothing, maybe he forgot, but the feeling that something is wrong is still wrapping its spidery fingers around her shoulder, slowly tightening its grip. Just barely a month into hanging out with the guy, and he’s gone without a trace? It’s still probably that he got really busy, but Laura can’t shake the mental images of some of the weird shit he’s talked about doing outside of the gym—gaining and losing sixty pounds like it was nothing, almost burning to death in the crack house that his bar became, or the time that the Dennis guy drove their whole group into a fucking lake. 

She should call him, right? That’s not weird. She should call. But maybe it  _ is _ weird to call?

It’s too late to worry about that, Laura realizes, because she’s already holding her cell phone up to her ear and it’s ringing. She’s dialed his number.

The rings are endless, each buzz of the phone dragging out second after painstaking second, and right when Laura’s sure that he’s either dead in another fire or that his phone’s lying at the bottom of another lake, there’s a slight click as the call gets picked up, and Laura’s breath hitches. 

“Yeah?” Mac’s voice drones from the other end of the line. Well, he certainly doesn’t sound like he’s on fire. In fact, it’s more like the opposite—he’s moving through molasses, and there’s very clearly a rerun of Knight Rider playing in the background. “What do you want?”

“Dude, guess who’s at the gym right now. Alone,” says Laura. “You didn’t come today. I just wanted to, like, make sure you were okay. But if you’re just sitting at home watching TV, you could have at least texted me so I didn’t have to wait at the gym like an idiot. I could have been preparing dance stuff.” 

“Oh. Sorry,” Mac mumbles in close to the receiver, and Laura swears she can hear his voice crack a bit at the end of “sorry”. 

Laura takes a seat at the foot of the treadmill that she was thinking about using anyway. “Okay. Uh, are you good?” she asks, with a sinking feeling suggesting that the voice crack she heard had already indicated a negative answer. “If you had other plans, it’s fine—”

“No, I just—” There’s a little gulp-choke type sound from Mac’s end. “I’ll see you on Sunday, okay? I’ll see you on Sun—” And at that point, his voice cracks so badly that his words just cut off completely and it’s just short, jagged breaths for about ten more seconds. Laura’s heart sinks. 

“Okay, look, I don’t know what’s going on, but I do know one thing,” she cuts in, swinging one foot up to rest next to her at the base of the treadmill. The guy on the treadmill next to hers lets out a scoff and shoots a disapproving glare down at her, but Laura gives him the stink eye and flips him the bird as she continues her phone conversation. 

“I  _ do  _ know that moping around on the couch is pointless and usually gets you nowhere. So what you  _ could _ do is get out of the house, and come meet me at the gym.”

There’s a brief silence from Mac’s end before he speaks again. “Noooo,” he says, easing into the word like if he’s slow enough, Laura won’t realize that he’s not agreeing with her until she hangs up the phone. It doesn’t work.

“Come on,” chides Laura, pressing the phone closer to her face. “It always feels better to get out of the house. And, come on. What did Elle Woods say in Legally Blonde? Endorphins make you happy. Happy people don’t shoot their husbands, Mac. They just don’t.”

Mac doesn’t laugh. Maybe he hasn’t seen it. Or maybe he had a husband that he ended up shooting, and the reference hit too close to home. Laura has a feeling that she’s barely skimmed off the top layer of metaphorical pudding skin when it comes to the gooey mess that is The Weird Shit in Mac’s Life, so she’s not ruling out either option just yet.

“I don’t feel like going to the gym right now,” Mac finally mutters. “Look, I gotta go. I—”

“Fine, it doesn’t  _ have  _ to be the gym,” Laura concedes. “Anything’s better than sitting around. Look, what if—” And the perfect idea smacks her upside the head. “Okay, what if I meet you at Paddy’s? It’s not still closed, is it?”

Another pause. “No.”

“No, you don’t want to meet me at Paddy’s, or no, it’s not closed?”

A longer pause. “No, it’s not closed.”

Laura’s still waiting on a yes or a no. “And?”

“And?”

“Do you want to meet me at Paddy’s right now?”

“I...sure.”

“Great.” Even though she knows Mac can’t see it, Laura smiles gently to herself. “I’ll go get changed, and I’ll be there in a few.”

* * *

So even though Mac had said that Paddy’s Pub wasn’t technically “closed” anymore, it’s clearly far worse for wear than the way it had looked when Laura had stopped by three weeks earlier. The entire front façade of the building is mottled with scorch and burn marks, blotches of soot crawling out of every crack in the door and from the windows. There’s still the burnt-out shell of the same SUV parked across the street from the bar, tattered yellow remnants of caution tape past litter the sidewalk, and, to top it all off, the second that Laura opens her car door, the smell of gasoline smacks her upside the head with a vengeance. Which is why Laura is, for the most part, unsurprised when she cracks open the door and shuffles through to find Mac alone nursing a beer behind the bar, not a single customer or other employee in sight.

“Well, the inside is better than the outside,” Laura blurts. She’s right; the fire pretty clearly started on the outside of the building, and what damage managed to reach the interior is not nearly as bad as the outside might convey. There’s big black marks running down the length of the floor, and a few of the booths look like they were also caught in the flames, but, miraculously, the bar itself, despite being made entirely of wood, appears unscathed. 

“Yeah, well, we got the inside looking passable, and we’ll have it good by inspection day anyway,” Mac mumbles before slamming back the rest of his beer.

There’s an awkward silence between them, and Laura takes the pause in conversation to settle onto a creaky barstool across the bar from where Mac has himself slumped up. 

“No, take your time,” Laura jokes, “I know how hard it is to deal with crowds.”

Mac glances around the empty bar, pushes himself up off of the counter, and grabs another bottle of beer from behind him. He barely even glances at the label before he snatches up a bottle opener and pries the cap off, sending it skidding across the bar.

“It’s kind of a shame,” Laura laughs, attempting to fill the silence. “I’ve heard so much about all of your friends, right, and now they’re not even here. I wanted proof for all the stories you told me, god damn it!” She lets out another half-hearted chuckle and tries to mock-bang her fist on the bar. She overreaches, though, and she actually makes a pretty loud pounding noise, to which Mac flinches and glares down at his hands like they had personally wronged him.

“Sorry,” Laura rushes. “You were saying?”

Mac sighs laboriously. “Dee and Charlie are at fucking Chuck E. Cheeses. Skee-ball tournament.” He takes the first sip of beer from the new bottle and grimaces.

“I didn’t know Chuck E. Cheese even  _ had _ a skee-ball tournament,” says Laura, leaning over to rest on the bar. “And wouldn’t that be for, like, the kids or something? You’d think a parent would complain about it.”

“Chuck E. Cheeses doesn’t  _ have _ a skee-ball tournament,” Mac reiterates, gesturing with the beer bottle in his hand. “It’s just Dee and Charlie doing it. And they’re only there ‘cause they got us all kicked out of Dave and Buster’s, and then they got kicked out of Keystone on their own. So they have to bring their own drinks now, I guess.” He takes another light swig of his beer before mumbling “‘Course they had to get us kicked out of fuckin’ Dave and Buster’s.” With that, his face contorts into a masochistic kind of “fuck this” expression and he knocks it back hard, managing to down almost half the bottle.

Laura frowns and swats at his hand across the bar. “Take it easy, dude, unless you want to die. And if you die, we’ll never have another gym day again.”

Mac shrugs and scowls and takes another gulp. “I already said I didn’t want to go to the gym.”

“Why? Am I that bad?” Laura shakes her head. “I told you, just say something if you’re not coming so I don’t feel like an idiot.”

“Whatever,” Mac mumbles. “I’ll be back on Sunday, okay?” He drinks some more beer.

“Where’s the old guy?” Laura’s head snaps up with realization. “When I saw him before, he was  _ covered _ in gasoline. Did he…” Laura lowers her voice. “Did the fire… get him? Because you could have just said so and I would have been okay with that. Not  _ okay  _ okay, but, you know, I’ve lost relatives, too, and if you want to talk, I—”

“Frank?” Mac’s expression shifts from mopey to confused as he straightens up. “Oh, no, that bitch is fine. I mean, he wasn’t thrilled about losing his crack buddies’ main hangout spot, but, hey, it’s not like they won’t see each other under the bridge still, so he needs to stop bitching about it if you ask me.”

Laura presses her lips together, raising her eyebrows. “Okay, then, is he off under a goddamn bridge, then?” she says, half joking. “Or, wait, let me guess, is he playing skee-ball at Chuck E. Cheese, too? Seems to be all the rage around here.”

“Nah, that’s not his thing,” Mac answers. “He’s stealing the tokens and selling them to desperate parents on the cheap. Not really my kind of scheme, though, anyway.”

“Man, listen to yourself.” Laura settles back into the seat of her barstool with a grin. “Always talking about this scheme and that scam and whatever—god, you sound almost like my ex.” 

“Like your ex—” Mac falters and freezes. “Shit, do you think it was me? I slept with a lot of chicks before I came out. And, I mean, most of the girls I slept with had already been with Dennis, so maybe  _ he _ —”

“Well, she was a woman, so no,” Laura interrupts. “I meant like an ex- _ girlfriend _ , not an ex-hookup. And trust me, okay, you’re not nearly as bad as her. She was literally  _ always _ talking about scamming people, and it was, you know, fun and silly at first, but by the time I realized that she was nuts, she was actually scamming people, for real. Basically, now, I literally rate potential partners on a scale of chill to Cindy.”

The worry on Mac’s face makes way for relief, but, unfortunately, it goes a little bit further than Laura expected: into excitement. “So, wait, if she does this a lot, is she any good? Has she pulled off a lot of stuff?”

Laura lets out a giggle before she quickly glances up to check Mac’s expression again. The tension and wrinkles of sadness are slowly starting to ease and fade, which means that Laura doesn’t have to feel bad about not-so-subtly shifting the conversation away from her crazy ex-girlfriend (and Laura  _ is  _ a woman, okay, so she doesn’t use the term lightly). This gives her the freedom to lean her elbows down on the bar, rest her chin in the palm of her hand, and ask for the thing she’s really craving right now. 

“Hey, are you just going to drink alone, or can I get a beer, too, or what?”

Mac knocks back a little more of his beer and cocks an eyebrow at her. “Uh, you’re gonna have to pay for it, so...”

“Aw, come  _ on _ ,” Laura teases. “What, no friends and family discount for your favorite gym buddy?”

Mac snorts. “You’re not friends  _ and _ family, stupid.” But after he laughs, he smiles back at Laura, and he reaches behind the bar and snatches up another bottle. “Is Coors good?”

“If that’s what we’re working with, than yeah.” Laura reaches out a hand as Mac extends the unopened beer bottle towards her. “Even before you ghosted me, I’ve had a long-ass day. So come on, put ‘er there.”

Her fingers flick towards the surface of the cool brown glass, but Mac snatches it away before she can get a good hold on it. “Five dollars first,” he reiterates, clutching the bottle close to his chest. “Or no drink.”

“For real?” Laura groans, suddenly aware of how dry her throat is getting. “I thought that was a joke or something.”

“The ‘stupid’ was a joke,” Mac clarifies. “The money thing was not.” He shoots a quick nervous glance around the bar, and then snaps back to Laura like he’s pretending his eyes never left her. 

Laura sighs and takes a look around as well. It’s not like the bar is getting any other business today, or maybe any time soon, so what the hell. She fishes her wallet out of her pocket. “Geez, dude, you underestimate how much I need a drink today,” she says with a slight smile as she slides a five-dollar bill across the bar.

“ _ Dude _ ,” he protests, his lower lip jutting out like a little kid, “ _ lesstimate _ , remember?”

“Fine. You  _ lesstimate  _ how much I need a drink today,” Laura chuckles, waving her hand out in front of her until he places the beer bottle into it. “ _ Thank _ you.” She grabs the bottle opener from where Mac left it, pries off the cap with a grunt, and finally takes a sip. The beer tastes like sweet, sweet release. Also, it tastes like sweat a little bit, and not much else. But she’s not about to complain; a drink is a drink, even if it’s kind of a crappy beer. She’s not a beer snob.

“And I said I wasn’t gonna drink this week,” she laughs to herself. “ _ And _ I blew it on a Coors Light, of all things.” She takes another sip, and when she looks back up at Mac, he’s looking at her like she grew a second head. “What?”

“You weren’t gonna drink for a week?” he puzzles. “But Lent’s over.” 

“I—what?” Laura sets down her beer. “I don’t—I’ve never done Lent, I’m not Catholic. Or Christian, whatever. No, I just try not to. Mostly for dance things, ‘cause it messes with my system, and I wanna be at peak performance. My show is this weekend, so I’d like to, you know, treat my body a little better while I can.”

Mac shrugs, the lip of his beer bottle already in his mouth. “Yeah, well, life’s too short if you ask me,” he says after he’s finished quaffing a quarter more of the bottle. 

“You talk all about gaining muscle, though,” Laura points out, “but if you drink every day? That does shit to your metabolism. That’s like going out for fancy dinners every single night, okay, it’s just not good for you.” 

Mac’s face twists into something more troubled, and Laura only has a second or two to realize that something is wrong before he opens his mouth again. “I can go out for fancy dinners whenever I want, okay?”

“I’m...not saying you can’t?” Laura leans into her barstool. “If I’m keeping you from your plans, I mean, I’m here because you didn’t come to the gym. I called you and I asked you if you were doing something.”

“Yeah, well, I was,” Mac mumbles back to her, staring back down at the bar.

“Mac, I asked you if you wanted to come. Go back to what you were doing, which, by the way, sounded like sitting alone watching Knight Rider. I don’t have to be here, okay?” And with that, Laura pretty much just expects Mac to storm out. Great. Leave her sitting alone in a shitty, abandoned, burnt-up bar. 

But Mac looks like he’s frozen instead, like he can’t break the magnetic lock that his feet have with the ground to turn away from her or leave the room, but he can’t let their eyes meet, either, so he turns his head, latching onto some point on the back wall behind him.

No, hold on. He’s not just staring at the wall to avoid making eye contact with her. His gaze is fixed on… Well, it’s fixed on  _ something _ , but the back wall is plastered with signs and decorations and other assorted knick-knacks that Laura can’t exactly pick out what exactly Mac is focusing on. It doesn’t matter, though. His loss, she’ll see him at the gym and hope he’s being less of a stubborn bitch then, whatever. She pushes back in her barstool and rises to do some light storming out of her own. 

It’s only then that Laura is able to pinpoint the photo that Mac’s looking at. It’s stuck down so far that it’s basically touching the counter, and its corner is shoved behind approximately three separate bottles of liquor, so Laura hadn’t really been able to see it when she was sitting down. But now that it’s actually in her line of vision, it leaps out at her right away because Mac’s gaze is focused so intently on it, and with a little focus of her own, she’s finally able to make out the image.

Three guys stand with their arms around each other in front of what looks to be Paddy’s Pub, but in much better shape than the scorched hellhole that Laura’s currently standing in. Like, it’s still grubby and grimy, but, at the very least, it looks like a normal grubby grimy bar, and not like it was caught in a crack cocaine and gasoline fire. It’s almost got charm, comparatively.

The guy in the middle is definitely Mac, but he looks younger, skinnier, scrappier, and his hair is soft and flopping in his face, a stark departure from the dark, shellacked mass that she’s never seen Mac’s head without. It’s easy to tell it’s him, though; one thing that hasn’t changed is the excited-puppy smile plastered on his face. Even if there’s not a hint of that smile on Mac’s face right now.

The guy on Mac’s right is a little bit shorter and a whole lot scruffier than Mac is. His brown hair is poking out of his flat cap every which way, and his clothing is kind of stained and dirty, and he’s also got his eyes closed in the picture. However, he looks just as excited and joyous as any of the men in the picture, and Mac is clutching him close to his side like his life depends on it.

The guy with his arm around Mac’s other side is a bit taller and slimmer, and, unlike Mac and the other guy, he’s clean-shaven. Mac has an iron grip on this guy’s shoulder, too, creating sharp dark creases in the guy’s light blue t-shirt, but, judging by the smile on his face,neither of them appear to mind.

They all look young. And they all look really, really happy.

“Charlie and Dennis?” she asks without thinking, and Mac’s head jerks up like it’s trying to launch off of his body. “You know, because, I mean, I met Frank, sort of, right, and, I mean, unless one of them is Dee—”

“No, yeah, that’s—that’s them,” Mac clarifies, sighing. “We made Sweet Dee take it. That’s when we bought Paddy’s, so.” He takes another sip of beer. He’s still not meeting Laura’s eye.

“Which one’s Charlie?” Laura asks, pitching up her voice slightly in some kind of attempt to lighten the mood. “I want to know who I need to visualize tearing it up at a Chuck E. Cheese.”

Mac loosely gestures to the guy on the right.

“So that’s one’s the famous Dennis, huh?” Laura grins, pointing to the guy at the left of the photograph, waggling her eyebrows up and down at Mac. “Where’s he right now? Wait, no, don’t tell me. The Chuck E. Cheese?”

Mac’s expression sinks even lower. “No, he’s—he’s not here anymore.” Another voice crack.

Oh, shit. Oh, shit shit  _ shit _ . “Did—” Laura starts. “Did  _ he  _ get caught in the fire? Shit, dude, I’m so sorry. I thought—you made it sound like it all turned out okay, and I promise I never would have said anything if—”

“No,” Mac cuts her off suddenly. “He moved. Across the country. A few months ago.”

“Oh.” Laura frowns. “I mean, that sucks too, I get that.”

Mac frowns too. “Yeah.”

Laura looks back down at the picture. The ways these guys have their arms around each other, you’d think them inseparable. “Do you at least know when he can come back to visit?”

“I don’t… I don’t know if he’s gonna come back.”

“Why not?”

Mac swallows thickly. “I think I’m the reason he left.”

“Oh.”

They sit in silence for a little while, because Laura has no idea what the hell to say to that. She’s aware, now, that this is the first time that she and Mac have been together in a room completely alone, without the buzz of a crowded gym at their heels. And now that they are alone? It’s like the only things that exist are the two of them and the two beers they’re grasping like anchors. The soot-blistered walls of Paddy’s Pub may very well be the vast black reaches of the entire goddamn universe.

Although now that she thinks about it, they sort of have been in a room together before. The sauna, though it had been less of a room and more of a vacuum of festering anger.

In fact, now that Laura thinks about it, that had been almost exactly one month ago.

“Is this week special or something?” Laura breaches. Mac looks at her funny, and Laura immediately gulps down a little bit of beer so she doesn’t have to look him in the eye right away. “Not… not special, but, like, you know, is there something, like an anniversary of something, maybe?”

“How did you know?” Mac asks, straightening up. 

“‘Cause a month ago was around when I first met you,” Laura says, “and you were messed up then, too. You know, with the whole…” She gestures vaguely with her free hand circling near Mac’s face. 

Mac looks like he’s about to protest, then sighs and slumps back. “It’s just that we used to go out to dinner every month.”

“You and Dennis?”

“Yeah,” Mac confirms with a nod. “But he left only a couple weeks after I came out, so… I think maybe that’s what scared him off. Doing stuff with a gay guy? Living together, going out to dinner, gifts and stuff like that? I don’t know, he got weird about it after. But I never thought he wouldn’t do Monthly Dinner anymore. Or that he would piss off to North Dakota.”

“Yeah, well, fuck him, then,” Laura retorts. “Two guys can go out to dinner without it being a date, and if he’s threatened by you being gay, then he’s a brain-dead bastard and his opinion doesn’t matter.” Emboldened, Laura swigs some more crappy beer and leans forward. “What, would he think that every time I went to IHOP with my friends, that was a date? Grow up.”

“Okay, we were better than IHOP,” Mac protests. “We always went to Gugino’s. Candles, flowers on the tables—you know, fancy shit.”

Laura leans back. “Damn, okay, then, maybe Dennis was onto something, ‘cause that sounds like a date.”

The joke evidently doesn’t land, because Mac shakes his head and turns back around. “I tried to text him, the first time. Wish him a happy Monthly Dinner, you know, say that I missed him. But the number was blocked. So I haven’t tried since. But tomorrow’s still going to be weird. And bad.”

“You want my honest opinion?” says Laura, slapping her hand over her heart in an exaggerated vow. “If he’s not going to give you the time of day, make other plans tomorrow. I bet it’ll help a lot, ‘cause it’s like, you know, you’re better than him, you don’t need him.”

“I don’t know.” Mac looks away and takes another sip of his beer. “The rest of the gang is still at Chuck E. Cheeses, and, like, when they do stuff like this, it can last up to a week sometimes, right? They’ll probably still be there tomorrow, so I don’t even know what I would do.” 

And just like that, Mac has grouched himself into a perfect solution, a setup that Laura had never even considered setting up. 

“Come to my dance show tomorrow,” she proposes, leaning in with a smile. “I promise we have a good company, and I think you might actually like it.”

Mac looks up. “Really?”

“Yeah, I really do,” Laura says with a smile. “Plus, you’ll see me lift a girl in the air and I can finally say ‘I told you so’ on that being the reason why I’m so damn strong.”

“So, wait.” Mac sets his beer bottle aside and lays his hands flat on the bar. “So you’re just gonna be dancing? For how long?”

“I mean, it’s not just me. There’s a lot of us. Some group numbers, some duets, some solos,” she answers. “We’re good, though, trust me.”

Mac pulls his head back and squints at her. “But you’re… just dancing, though? For how long? Wouldn’t that get kinda boring after a while?”

Laura stares at Mac. He does not appear to be joking, but it’s not malicious, either. So, in other words, classic Mac.

“Dude, now all you’re doing is pretty much confirming that you have to come.” Laura chuckles and gives Mac’s arm a nudge. “Just so I know that you actually know what I’m talking about all the time. I’ll set aside a ticket for tomorrow at 7:30, okay? But you have to pay for it in advance so you can pick it up at will call. It’s thirty bucks.”

“Okay, here’s where we’re not on the same page,” Mac interrupts before she can tell him where the performance is going to be and how he can get there. “Because since this was your idea, I thought maybe you’d be in charge of the money part, and I could be in charge of the going-and-seeing-the-show part.”

“Mac, you  _ just  _ refused to give me a friends and family discount on this beer.” Laura holds up her beer bottle and presents it to Mac like a game show host. 

“Okay, well, that was five dollars. Versus thirty.” Mac shrugs. “Come on, man, that’s at  _ least _ five times more, so.”

“Yeah, actually, in fact, it’s six,” Laura fires back. “And that was a Coors Light. And this is two hours of entertainment and artistry. And I’m your  _ friend _ , dude.” She raises her eyebrows. “At the most, I can try to get you a voucher for the bar. But you can’t put a price on friendship.”

Mac stands behind the bar, the gears visibly turning in his head. After what feels like a full minute, he sighs and heads toward the cash register. “This better be a really good show,” he calls to Laura as he pops the register open, “and you better find that voucher, too.” He snatches up three ten-dollar bills from under the clip and ambles back over to Laura, clutching the money warily.

“You promise that if I pay you now, they’ll be able to save a ticket for me?” he asks, glancing down at the bills in his hand and back up at Laura. “At the will call thing?”

“Leave it to me, Mac, okay?” Laura reaches out and slides the money out from Mac’s palm into her own. “I promise, you’re gonna love it.”

* * *

Laura emerges into the lobby on Friday night after the performance feeling coated. Her stage makeup hangs thick and mildly melty on her face, and the amount of sweat in which she’s currently marinating is making for a very concerning stew of odors. But through the soaking armpits and the aching muscles, she couldn’t care less; she’s riding high on the dopamine rush of the show. Her solo had gone off without a hitch, and so had her duet with Marchelle. There’d been a few mistakes in the larger group numbers, but nothing that an untrained eye would have noticed. The exhilaration is palpable, too, among the audience members who are left milling about the lobby. This is why she loves what she does.

She’d told Mac to wait for her, with the pretense that she wanted to see what he thought of it, but that wasn’t the whole picture. If she had just wanted to see what Mac thought, she could have asked him on Sunday when he came strolling into the gym after church. No, it was more that she wanted to keep an eye on him, see if he was…stable, for lack of a better word? Just because of the whole Dennis thing.

She wasn’t totally sure she understood the Dennis situation, really, if she was being honest. Up until yesterday, from the way Mac had talked about him, she’d assumed that he was still around. Mac had never said anything like “Dennis was” or “Dennis used to”, and now that she knows that he’s across the country, it strikes her as a little weird. Sure, he’s not dead or anything, but shit, the guy blocked his number. And she’d kind of been trying to be forgiving of the weird shit Mac had said Dennis had done, like the anthrax and the lake and the time he dressed as a hipster for Halloween back in 2012 (which apparently just involved adding glasses and a beanie to a normal outfit of his, but telling people it was all ironic), because, you know, Mac liked Dennis. 

And maybe Laura had thought Mac might have been talking about his boyfriend for a little bit, because of the Valentines gift that Mac had talked about giving him before, but finding out that not only is Dennis not Mac’s boyfriend, but that he’s evidently a homophobic bastard who ran away the second he found out Mac was gay? The sooner she can make Mac forget about him, the better.

“Hey, Laura!” a voice shouts from somewhere off to Laura’s left, and she hardly has enough time to turn around, before Mac is there, grabbing her by the shoulders, vibrating with excitement. 

The puppy-dog is back?

“Laura! You were dancing up there, right, but, like, it made me feel feelings, you know?” Mac gushes, and Laura has to steady her footing because Mac is shaking her so exuberantly. “Like, I almost teared up a little bit, but I didn’t, but if I was any less tough, I would’ve been  _ close _ .”

Laura pulls back for a second, taking note of the fact that Mac’s eyes are  _ very  _ red, which either means that he’s incredibly high or that he’s bending the truth about how much he cried. She’ll take the compliment nonetheless.

“I’m—I’m glad you enjoyed it,” Laura stammers, because Mac hasn’t taken his hands off of her shoulders and is still shaking her back and forth with gleeful abandon. 

“Yeah, and when you were onstage alone? There was still, like—I mean, I still  _ felt it _ , you know?” Mac barrels on, finally letting go of Laura to wave around his hands like it’s the only way to get rid of the energy buzzing through his fingertips. “And, like, the other one-person ones, too, yeah, but  _ you— _ ” He dives in for a bear hug, catching Laura slightly off guard, but not off guard enough for her to not hug back. 

“Thanks, yeah,” Laura mumbles into Mac’s shoulder, because she’s just expended all of her physical and mental energy, so the likelihood of her meeting Mac where he’s at is basically nonexistent.

Mac finally pulls away, grinning like a fool. “Jesus Christ, though, you’re sweating like a hog.” He takes a second to wipe his hands off on his shirt (which, Laura notes, has sleeves today, albeit short ones. Paradoxically enough, it also has “I flexed and the sleeves fell off” printed across the front). “Oh my god, for real, though, how did you do that?”

“How?” Laura asks. “What do you mean, how? You see me at the gym at least twice a week, working my ass off, and I do the same thing in the studio. You get somewhere with it.”

“No, I mean—I mean, how do you do all that by…” Mac pauses, conveying something with his hands that just looks like frantic waving, but that Laura gets the gist of, anyway. “Like, without saying anything. Just by…moving.”

“Oh, you mean the emotion behind it?” Laura stops to think. “You just… you base it on something real, I guess, and you feel while you do it, and you can show stuff that there isn’t even words for.” Just saying that makes her heart warm. Dance is the best, actually. And the fact that Mac actually wants to hear her talk about it? It’s a little sweet, a little “I told you so”, and a little “oh dear god not now I will collapse into an exhaustion coma if I don’t get home to sleep right now”. But she’ll try. “You kind of just take all your shit and channel it into it.”

“Yeah, but, like—” Mac halts again, hunting for his words. “You were… _ sad _ . For real, up there. No way you were faking that. You—you were sad, and then you were so mad, I thought you gonna kill that girl for real or something.”

“Yeah, that one we based on some… rough stuff,” Laura laughs nervously. “Marchelle and I choreographed that one based some events from her life, and it was  _ tough _ , for both of us. Obviously, I’m not gonna, like, expose her personal life, but…” She realizes just post-conjunction that she doesn’t have anything else to say (at least not without Marchelle present), and she just ends up trailing off.

“So, wait,” Mac says. “So it was stuff that happened before? If you already went through the shit, then why would you ever want to think about it more, and make a dance about it? Seems to me like that would just be more shitty again.”

“We’re not that depressing,” Laura retorts. “I mean, my solo was based around, like, freeing yourself, so that’s good. And they’re not all that deep, anyway.”

“No offense, dude, but I didn’t think that any dancing was that deep before, so now that I actually really liked it and felt stuff, I just don’t get why you would want to do sad shit and feel sad and shitty again.”

“It’s not about feeling sad, though,” Laura shoots back. “It’s about, like, knowing that people can get what you’re feeling, and so if they feel the same way, you connect with them without talking to them. It’s like… it’s like breaking a language barrier. They say art is the universal connector, right?”

“Wait, who says that?” Mac asks, baffled.

“People? I don’t know. But, you know, it’s like telling a story without opening your mouth. And even if it’s shitty stuff...” She pauses. “You feel a little better, and a little less alone.”

Mac’s face tightens up, and he goes silent for a few seconds, thinking, considering her answer. And then he says the last words that Laura expects to come out of his mouth. “Can you teach me how?”

“What?”

“Laura.” Mac gives her a look. “You know I suck at words. And I don’t know, it was like you didn’t need them. And… I got a lot going on right now. A lot of shit.”

Laura purses her lips and gives a half-hearted smile. She hadn’t wanted to bring up the Monthly Dinner stuff if Mac hadn’t brought it up first, and even now that he has, she’s still only willing to poke and prod at it. “Yeah, I know. Dennis?”

Mac’s face twists into confusion. “What? No, I was thinking about God. Because, well—” He grimaces. “You know.” He kind of gestures up and down at himself. 

Laura frowns. “I don’t.”

He looks at her like she’s an idiot. “Because I’m gay? And that’s a sin?”

“Oh— _ oh _ ,” Laura fumbles. “Right, yeah, sorry.” Stupid. It wasn’t like she ever forgot that Mac was Catholic, since he always came from church on their Sunday gym days, and sometimes he’d mention something he’d heard in the service, and he had a cross necklace on half the time she saw him. And it also wasn’t like she hadn’t considered the possibility of religious guilt in his past, sure. But he had mentioned both facts about himself with such outward ease that Laura hadn’t really ever stopped to consider that he was wrestling with that shit now. 

“Yeah,” Mac continues, taking no notice of Laura’s internal monologue. “And it’s like, when I pray, half the time I don’t know what to say, or if he’s listening. But maybe it’s more about the feeling and the thought, and not just the words. I don’t know.”

“So, let me get this straight.” Laura mops a small ocean of sweat from her brow. “You want to learn how to dance so you can pray better?”

“No, you’re not getting it,” Mac frets, his legs getting antsy, and he smacks his head with his palm, sliding it down to rub at his eyes. “See, this is what I mean. If I can’t even get the right words to talk to  _ you _ , then how the hell am I supposed to talk to  _ God? _ ” Then he glances back at Laura, a twinge of guilt hitting his face. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Laura responds, “I’m not God.”

“Okay, cool.” Mac nods. “I just think if I don’t have to talk about it, and I’ll still feel better, that’s a pretty good setup.”

Laura snorts. “Yeah, well, I guess it’s cheaper than therapy.”

“Okay, yeah, I want to feel better,” Mac asserts, “but also, it just looks cool? You  _ lifted  _ her in the  _ air. _ I want to be able to do a routine like that. Like you did. And I mean, if I don’t have to talk about my shit to make it better, that’s a pretty good bonus.”

“So what, then?” Laura asks. “Do you want to help me choreograph some prayers for you?”

“Okay, you seem really focused on the prayer part. To be clear, I’m not doing prayer dances.”

“I know, but the idea of you just dancing at God is the funniest mental image that I’ve had in a while, so I’d like to hold onto it.” She demonstrates a couple Mac-like moves, because she’s seen him start to groove to music at the gym before, and it wasn’t dissimilar to his karate demonstration from earlier.

Mac claps his hands together. “Okay, I get it. And God would  _ love _ my dance moves, by the way.”

“Sure, he would.”

Mac scoffs, but then he melts into something far more earnest. “But, for real, you’d want to help me do this sometime? Because that would be awesome.”

“I mean, I still have more shows this weekend and next weekend,” Laura points out. “But after that? Yeah, sure, I’d be happy to. That would be fun. We can talk about it on Sunday, if you’re down.”

“Really?” Mac is absolutely fucking  _ beaming _ . “This is gonna be so good, I—” and he rushes forward into another hug, before pulling away with a wide grimace. “Okay, man, you reek.”

“Yeah, I need a shower real bad,” Laura admits. “I should be heading out.”

“Is that why you’re supposed to buy people flowers after shows? Or how people throw them on the stage sometimes?” Mac ponders. “Is that to cancel out the smell?”

“Okay, I’ll see you Sunday, Mac.”

* * *

After discussing it a couple of times at the gym, and after Laura’s weekends of performances, they finally meet up on a street corner to form a game plan. Laura had suggested meeting at a Starbucks or something, since that seemed the easiest, but Mac had wanted to swing by the convenience store on the other corner, and Laura was down, so after meeting him outside, she stood in one of the convenience store aisles, leaning against one of the racks while Mac browses chips a few feet away.

“So, like, what are you thinking?” she asks.

“I’m not sure,” Mac mumbles. “I’m usually a Barbecue kind of guy, but I also feel like I just bought those, so maybe Original is the way to go.”

“Not the chips.”

“Not the chips?”

“The dance?”

“Oh, yeah.” Mac, with some apprehension, snatches up a bag of Original and a bag of Barbecue-flavored chips before turning around. “I mean, I don’t know. You’re the dancer here.”

“Yeah, but I can’t feel your feelings,” Laura counters, finally pushing off of the rack she’s leaning on to go grab some Chex Mix. “I’ll get us in the studio as soon as I can, trust me. And I can start with basic technique. But if your end goal is a really personal kind of dance, you can’t just expect me to pull catharsis out of thin air for you, you know?”

“Okay, so then what do I have to start with?” Mac grouses. “What do you want to hear?”

“Like, why do you want to do a whole dance?” Laura steps up next to Mac, presenting her Chex Mix, and they start walking up to the counter to pay. 

“It’s kind of—” Mac stops flat in his tracks and turns around, opening the refrigerated case next to him and pulling out a bottle full of clear pink liquid.

“Is that an energy drink?” Laura squints down at the label. It doesn’t look like one; the packaging is bright and colorful and not “lightning-rage-power-bleh” in the way a lot of energy drinks look. 

“Oh my god,” Mac groans, whipping around with a don’t-get-me-started look on his face. “Sweet Dee drinks this dumb flavored antioxidant water like she thinks it makes her healthy. It’s so stupid, ‘cause if she actually wanted to be healthy, then she wouldn’t be drinking this shit, trust me. It smells like fruit-flavored cat piss.” He plunks the bottle down on the counter, along with his two bags of chips. “She’s like… like a bird who drinks cat piss.”

“Then why are you buying it? If you hate it, I mean.” Laura rests her bag of Chex Mix on the counter next to Mac’s stuff.

Mac turns to her, puzzled. “Well, Dennis used to buy it for her once a week, but now that he’s gone, I do it. Who else is gonna do it? Someone has to.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Laura says, even though she doesn’t really get it. It’s almost an oddly sweet gesture.

“Excuse me,” the younger cashier calls out from behind the counter.

“Right, yeah, we’re paying.” Laura forces a smile for the cashier, before grumbling “Where’s the fuckin’ fire, big shot?” under her breath, which Mac apparently hears her say, because he snorts in response.

“Yeah, okay,” Mac responds, sliding his chips and the pink beverage towards the cashier, and fishes his wallet out of his back pocket.

“Wait, holy shit,” the cashier mumbles to himself. “Aren’t you the piano faggot guy?”

Laura blinks, the world around her unsettling and resettling. Just the word itself sends that visceral shudder through her body, but Mac flinches even harder beside her, and suddenly a defensive rage sparks in her stomach, firing up into her mouth. “I’m sorry, what did you just call my friend?” Laura takes a firm step forward, placing her palm on the counter and staring the cashier in the eye. “Care to repeat that?”

The cashier’s eyes widen. “No, no, I didn’t mean it like—I’m gay, I mean, so it’s not like… yeah. But aren’t you the guy who—you know—when the piano—”

“Oh.  _ Oh _ ,”—realization dawns on Mac’s face—“right, yeah. Uh, can I get my chips, though? ‘Cause I—”

“Of course, sorry,” the cashier fumbles, reaching out to scan Mac’s chips and drink. “I saw it, by the way. I was across the street, so I’m not, like, calling you anything, I’m just—”

“Yeah,” Mac cuts him off and slaps a five-dollar bill on the counter. “Can I get my chips?”

The cashier locks his eyes on the cash register as he hands Mac his change, and the second that the coins clink together in Mac’s palm, the bell above the door is clanging and Laura stands alone at the counter.

Laura wordlessly pays for her Chex Mix as quickly as possible and pops the bag open as she joins Mac outside. “Hey, what was that? Why’d he call you that? Are you okay?”

Mac is already snacking intermittently from both open bags of chips, leaning hunched against the brick outer wall of the convenience store. “It was ‘cause—it’s stupid. You met Frank, right?”

“Short old guy?” 

“Yeah. He… called me a faggot. To warn me about a falling piano. In public, so a lot of people were around. Including that guy, I guess.” Mac furrows his brow at the pavement. “But I ended up winning, so, uh, joke’s on them.”

“Winning what?” Laura asks. “The piano?”

“No, the lottery,” Mac clarifies, which actually serves to clarify nothing for Laura, but okay. He shoves another barbecue chip into his mouth. “I don’t know. That’s when I came out, too, so.”

“So that’s why he said that?” Laura’s hand clenches around her chip bag, crinkling the plastic into her palm. “Because you told him you were gay? When did he get better about it? ‘Cause I thought you only came out a few months ago.”

“No, no, I came out  _ because  _ he called me that. They ruled it a hate crime if I was gay, and so I got a lotto ticket out of it. And part of me kind of wanted to do it anyway,” Mac confesses. “Because it’s like—” he crunches down on another handful of chips “—it’s like once you admit something, you know, it’s easier to deal with.”

“Easier for you to deal with or for them to deal with?” Laura tries to catch Mac’s eye, but he’s still staring down at the sidewalk. “If they’re calling you shit like that, I can always beat their asses myself.”

Laura meant it as a kind of half-serious crack, but that’s finally what makes Mac’s head snap back up to face her. “Don’t beat their asses,” he mumbles, distraught. “They’re my friends. They’ll adjust.” His voice rings sincerely hopeful, but in light of the Dennis thing, Laura doesn’t get how that could possibly be the case.

“Okay, what about Frank? How is he adjusting?” Laura questions. “By calling you more slurs? Why stick by him, at least why now?” 

When Mac doesn’t answer (to be fair, his mouth is full of chips, and to speak right now would be to spew chip crumbs everywhere), Laura frowns. “Actually,” she says, “I don’t get where Frank fits into your whole friend group. Is he your dad or something?”

Mac actually laughs a little bit at that. “I’m basically almost the only one whose dad he  _ isn’t _ . He’s Dennis and Dee’s dad, but not actually their dad, you know, not the birth dad. And Charlie never knew his dad, so it  _ might _ be Frank? But his mom is a slut, so we don’t really know.”

“That’s kind of weird. That he’s just… around, constantly.”

“Kind of, yeah.” Mac reaches down for more chips, but then stops. “But most of the time, it’s good. And Charlie likes him, so…”

“Yeah.” Laura leans against the brick wall next to Mac, eating her Chex Mix at his side. “Is your family any better?”

“I told my mom a few weeks after the lotto ticket thing,” Mac relates, “and I told her again a month after that, and a month after that. I know she didn’t  _ forget _ forget, you know, ‘cause she cares about me a lot. She just needed a few reminders. A lot of reminders.”

“Yeah,” Laura sighs. “I know the feeling. My parents are fine with me bringing home girlfriends, but they keep asking when I’m going to cut it out and bring home a husband, you know? Just because they married really young and can’t fathom that I might have had to take a little more time to figure shit out, I guess.” She tosses a single pretzel up into the air and, to her own quiet delight, catches it perfectly in her mouth. “I swear, the last time they met a boyfriend that I had, my dad was pretty much about to start addressing Save the Dates right then and there.”

“Yeah.” Mac takes a moment to himself, to think or to eat more chips, Laura doesn’t know. He’s not looking at Laura, but he also might just be zoning out, which he also has a tendency to do. “My dad doesn’t know yet.”

He says it like he’s telling her that he ran out of toothpaste and that he has to buy a new tube; it’s a minor annoyance, but nothing that would be a lasting setback, or even a problem at all. However, his face betrays a deeper sense of distress, a twitch at the mouth, a quirk of the eyebrow. He coughs a bit, clears his throat, and unsettles back into silence.

“Are you planning on ever telling him?” It seems like the right thing for Laura to say next. Obviously, she’s not going to ask why his dad doesn’t know, because, homophobia, dumbass. But an insensitive parent is very different than an actively bigoted one, and Laura doesn’t quite know how to deal with the latter. If ignorance was bliss for her parents, then, well, at least it was better than “you’re going to hell”. “I mean,” she continues, “I completely understand not doing it. That just sucks.”

“No, I want to tell him,” Mac protests. “But since he’s in prison, it’s harder. That, and I don’t think he would get why I would want to be a sinner.”

Laura clicks her tongue. “Okay, first of all, I don’t think he should be the deciding voice in what is and isn’t an excusable sin, ‘cause didn’t he go to prison for murder?”

“No, they dropped the charges, because he was  _ framed _ ,” Mac frets. “They caught the guy who did it.”

Laura bites at her thumbnail. “Uh, I thought you said he was in jail right now.”

“Yeah, no, that’s for all the drugs he sold,” Mac clarifies. “He did do that, and that was a thing he did. But drugs are way better than murder. And more fun.”

Laura gives him a look.

“I haven’t murdered anyone,” he continues, tucking his chip bags under his arm and holding up his hands. “It’s just that drugs are fun. Although not fun when your dad is asking you to smuggle them to him in your asshole.”

“In your asshole?”

“Well, Jesus, I didn’t end up  _ doing _ it.” Mac shakes his head and wipes the chips crumbs away from his mouth. “And even if I had, that’d wouldn’t have been what made me gay, because I’m a top.”

“Yeah, I know,” Laura says, “you mention the fact that you’re a top at least once a week, Mac.”

“Yeah, ‘cause who else am I supposed to mention it to?” Mac scoffs. “My dad?”

“To people you are going to have sex with,” Laura counters. “Of which I am not one.”

“Yeah, I should hope not.” Mac nods in agreement. “Wait, did you forget I was gay? Because if you forgot, you better not need as many reminders as my mom that I’m not gonna want to sleep with you.” 

Laura’s nose involuntarily wrinkles at the vaguely Oedipal implications of Mac’s poor, poor phrasing, but she plows ahead anyway. “Dude, I didn’t forget that you’re gay. We were  _ just _ talking about you coming out to your dad. ”

“But I haven’t come out to my dad,” Mac puzzles. “That was the whole point.”

“But you want to,” Laura says, trying to steer the conversation back onto its rails. 

“I want to,” Mac confirms. “But, like, if it took  _ me _ this long, then he—I don’t think he’s gonna get it. ‘Cause I’m only allowed to sit down and talk with my dad at the prison for a super short time, and how am I supposed to say everything and  _ make  _ him get it?”

“Try me,” Laura dares.

“What, do you mean now?”

“Try to explain it like I’m your dad. It’ll be a start.”

“Um, okay.” Mac pushes himself up off of the side of the building, posturing and reposturing before finally turning to face Laura. “Hi, Dad. I have something to tell you.” His acting is wooden, but it’ll do.

“Hello, son,” Laura recites back, a disappointingly similar amount of wooden acting spouting from her mouth. “What do you have to tell me? Keep in mind that I love you no matter what, and you can tell me anything.”

Mac drops character. “Nah, he wouldn’t say that. He’s a busy guy who always has somewhere else to be. Try that,” Mac directs.

“I’m just trying to help you ease into it,” Laura concedes. “I thought it might be better for preparing.”

“Well, that doesn’t prepare me at all, because he wouldn’t say it out loud. He’d be thinking it, but he’d never say it to my face,” Mac emphasizes. “Because he’s busy and forgetful.”

“In prison? How busy can he be?”

“ _ Very  _ busy, actually.” Mac pulls out his chips again to resume his snacking. “He’s too busy to talk to me almost every time I come to visit him.”

“Okay, what do you want?” says Laura, slipping back into her half-heartedly gruff Mac’s Dad voice. “You said you had something to tell me?”

“Uh, right, so—” Mac’s mouth begins to form a thought, but then he cuts off abruptly. “I can’t start with me being gay. Because then he might not listen to the rest of what I have to say.” He furrows his brow. “If I talk about it in relation to God or something, he might get it more faster.”

“So you said you had something you had to tell me?” Laura repeats, more encouragingly this time.

“Right, so…” Mac pauses again, and drops his posturing with a huff. “Okay, see, I don’t know how to talk about this. Because I know that it’s a sin, but also, I know that I’m gay, and I don’t want to  _ not  _ be—like when there was—was the time I was in church and the pastor—” Mac groans and slumps back against the wall. “I’m bad at this.”

“You’re not  _ that _ bad,” Laura lies. “And drop the “it’s a sin” thing, okay? Listen, Mac, I’ve known you for a few months now, and I can promise you that wouldn’t be the thing that would send you to hell.”

“Actually, as a human being, I’m a sinner by default,” Mac objects, “so really, it’s unavoidable. I just have to atone for it.” He plucks a single chip from the Barbecue bag and starts to fidget with it between his fingers. “And you’re not a Christian, anyway, so you can’t promise me anything about heaven and hell.”

Laura chuckles. “I mean, can anybody promise anything about the afterlife before they die themselves? All we know is life. Who’s to say that the ultimate goal isn’t just to find happiness now?”

Mac blinks at her. “The Bible, Laura.”

“Okay, but doesn’t the Bible say something about drinking?” Laura asks. “You drink literally all the time, to the point where it’s probably an issue. If anything, wouldn’t that be  _ more _ of a sin? Because you choose to do that. And you do that a  _ lot _ . And nobody upstairs has dared to smite you for it yet.”

Mac’s fist clenches around the chip in his palm, causing to to break into a lot of tiny pieces that he then proceeds to dump in his mouth. “Look, the Lord’s word is a complicated thing,” he murmurs through the mouthful of crumbs.

“Yeah, I… I guess.” Laura reopens her bag of Chex Mix and starts snacking again. Not because she’s hungry, though. In fact, her appetite is almost completely gone.

There’s no sound from Mac at her side for a little while, and only the roar of passing cars fills their silence. Then there’s a crumpling sound, and Mac is throwing an empty chip bag to the side.

“I’m never gonna be able to tell him, am I?” Mac says suddenly.

“I don’t know, Mac.”

“I mean, let’s face it,” he blurts. “I don’t know how to explain it to him, I don’t know how to explain knowing that I’m gay and knowing that I’m Catholic, and I don’t… Like, I took forty-two years to figure half this shit out. How am I supposed to talk about forty-two years in one visit when I don’t even know what words to start with?”

“Don’t ask me,” Laura sighs. “That’s why I dance, I guess.”

They’re snacking in silence for another thirty seconds at least before the air is pierced by a sharp gasp. Laura whips around to make sure she doesn’t have to do the Heimlich on Mac, but he’s not choking. Actually, he looks…excited.

“I think I have an idea,” Mac declares with an abject certainty. “This might actually work. I finally have a good scheme!”

“Wait, a scheme?” Laura groans. “Mac, I told you how you sound like Cindy when you—”

“Hear me out, hear me out, okay?” Mac interrupts. “Laura.  _ Laura _ . If I don’t know how to say it, what if I come out to my dad with a dance?”

Laura blinks a few times. “You want your dance to be for that?”

“Yeah. It’s perfect,” Mac raves, his fingers thrumming against the brick behind him. “I can tell him without using all the words, and he’ll have to watch the whole thing, so he can’t cut me off in the middle, and I can make him feel feelings the way you did to me when I saw your dance show! He’ll  _ have _ to get it after that. You said art is the universal connector, right?”

“I… I did say that,” Laura admits. “But, I mean, I thought that if I was teaching you from having no experience, I’d start with beginner stuff, real basic technique, and if you messed up, we could just work at it until you got better at it. Are you sure you don’t want to start with something a little more…low-stakes?”

“Laura,” Mac groans, “you said if I wanted to do a personal dance, I needed to think about what I wanted it to be. And now I have something. Something I really want to do.”

“Yeah, but…” Laura searches for the right words. “Are you sure that you should stake coming out to your dad on something like this? It’s your choice, but…you don’t owe him any explanation. You don’t owe him an understanding. And if you really think he could react badly, I don’t want you to put in effort he doesn’t deserve.”

Mac considers this. “I mean… He’s my dad. And I  _ want _ to try.”

“I don’t know, Mac.” Laura shakes her head. “This is an important thing, and maybe it’s better if you—”

“Yeah, obviously it’s important, that’s why I need your help,” Mac begs. “If it was a dance, I’d have a better chance of getting closer to my dad. I haven’t had a real chance to get closer to him in a really long time. And with your help, I might actually get one, if I can make him feel for me like that. You know?”

She knows.

“And if I wanna do this, I wanna do it right. And if anyone could help me do a dance right, it’s you. Right?”

Right.

“And so if you could help me do this, I think that…that would be really fucking awesome, wouldn’t it?”

A smile creeps up on Laura’s face. “Yeah. Yeah, it would.”

“So wait, is that a yes, or…”

Laura finishes off her Chex Mix, crumples the bag in her fist, and tosses it where Mac’s lies in the dirty road. “What are we waiting for? Let’s start planning.” 

Mac grins. “Let’s start planning.”

And with that, they walk down the street, and Mac is laughing, and Mac is making jokes, and Laura can’t help but smile that puppy-dog smile herself. It’s been quite some time since she’s smiled like that.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm super proud that I wrote and finished this so I hope you enjoyed it :D


End file.
